They’ve suddenly realized that the truth was staring them right in the face the whole time:
The 2012 London Olympics are more than a year away, but Iran already is threatening to boycott them. According to Bahram Afsharzadeh, secretary general of Iran’s National Olympic Committee, the 2012 Olympic logo secretly spells out the word “Zion,” which makes it “racist.” The Iranians also claim that use of the logo “is a disgracing action and against the Olympics’ valuable mottos.”
Remember the great fanfare (usually from “urban advocates” and local government bureaucrats) over the stunning success of London’s road pricing scheme? It immediately reduced traffic volumes in the downtown core of London, which also reduced the travel times for those drivers who were willing to pay the usage charges. It looked like a solid win for pay-for-use roads (which do, incidentally, make a great deal of economic sense . . . if they’re not being used as a cash cow to fund other transportation options instead).
Fast forward to today, and we discover that all the gains from introducing the congestion charge have been wasted:
According to Yass’ analysis, based on figures obtained from the Department of Transport and local bodies such as councils and Transport for London, the increase in traffic lights — and perhaps even more so, the increasing trend to prioritise pedestrian movement through junctions by changing lights’ programming — is seriously increasing congestion for wheeled road traffic (buses excepted in some cases, as they too are favoured by the lights).
The report indicates that a large fall in congestion was seen in London following introduction of the capital’s congestion charging scheme introduced by the previous mayor Ken Livingstone. A noticeable proportion of motorists ceased to drive in the charging zone, and vehicle numbers in the zone remain well down on previous levels. Nonetheless, congestion is now back up to its old state:
Monitoring reports of the congestion charging zone show that, after an initial improvement, congestion has been increasing again and is back to pre-charge levels, even though the number of vehicles entering the zone has not increased.
How could this have happened?
According to Yass, the gains achieved by the congestion charge have been wiped out by Mayor Ken’s parallel policy drive to cut down the time it takes to cross the road in London, and in particular to make the streets safer for the disabled. A large number of London’s new traffic lights would seem to have been put in at new pedestrian crossings — “most junctions were already controlled by lights”, writes Yass — and those at junctions now usually have “full pedestrian stages” where all traffic is held stopped in both directions.
It’s a crafty move, but it’s not clear whether it’s the buyer or the seller being the craftier:
London Stock Exchange Group Plc, the 210-year-old bourse operator, agreed to buy Toronto Stock Exchange owner TMX Group Inc. for about C$3.2 billion ($3.2 billion) in stock as the companies cut costs to counter lost market share. LSE surged to a two-year high.
LSE shareholders will own 55 percent of the company, while TMX investors will hold the rest, the exchanges said today in a statement. TMX shareholders will receive 2.9963 LSE shares for each they own, valuing the Toronto-based company at about C$42.68 a share, 6 percent more than yesterday’s closing price.
Xavier Rolet, LSE’s chief executive officer, will reduce 35 million pounds ($56 million) a year in costs and expand into new businesses such as derivatives as competition from alternative trading platforms increases as do mergers among rivals. His predecessor Clara Furse fought off five takeover offers in two years and bought the operator of the Milan stock exchange. The LSE’s share of U.K. equity trading was 63.8 percent last quarter, compared with 75 percent in 2009, data from the London- based company show.
It could be a way for London to diminish the impact of European rules on their business (by having a non-EU place to land if necessary) or it could be a way for the EU to extend their rule-making to the Canadian market. Or, and this is the least believable scenario, it might just be an ordinary acquisition by a company that happens to run stock markets.
Update: What is presented as a take over in other markets is being positioned (spun?) as a “merger” for domestic consumption:
TMX Group, which operates the Toronto Stock Exchange, and the London Stock Exchange announced Wednesday they are merging to create one of the world’s largest stock exchanges.
The merger, which is subject to regulatory approvals, is unanimously being recommended by the boards of both exchanges.
The merger, if approved, would give the new firm a value of just over $6 billion (Cdn.) and give LSE shareholders just over 50 per cent of the combined company.
TMX Group is valued at $2.99 billion, while the London Stock Exchange Group’s value is slightly higher, around $3.25 billion.
The new company will have the world’s largest number of listing, more than 6,700 companies with an aggregate value of $5.8 trillion, the partners said in a statement early Wednesday.
[. . .]
The company will be co-headquartered in Toronto and London with Xavier Rolet, the CEO of the London Exchange, retaining that position with the new company. The president will be Thomas Kloet, the CEO of TMX. The FO will be Michael Ptasznik, who currently holds the same post with TMX, and the company director will be Raffaele Jerusalmi, the Milan-based CEO of Borsa Italiana.
Expect this deal, even if it eventually gets regulatory approval, to drag on for most of this year.
Patrick Kingsley talks to the developers of “Sukey”, a new mobile phone app intended to help protesters avoid being kettled by police:
Cairo, it wasn’t. But at about a quarter to four last Saturday afternoon, on a crowded backstreet in central London, something happened outside the Egyptian embassy that deserves at least a footnote in the annals of protest history. A crowd of students weren’t kettled.
In the context of recent British protests, this was a near-miracle. At each of the previous four major student protests in London since the Millbank riot on 10 November, police have kettled — or, in their terminology, “contained” — thousands of protesters, preventing them from leaving an area for several hours, and often from accessing basic amenities such as food, water and toilets.
Police kettle protesters supposedly to quell violence, but protesters arguably only turn to violence out of frustration at being kettled. Most notoriously, police trapped hundreds of teenage schoolchildren inside a tight grid on Whitehall on 24 November — and only subsequently did a few of them smash up a police van abandoned in their midst.
Saturday’s non-kettle, then, was a victory in itself. But the real excitement wasn’t that it didn’t happen — but how it didn’t happen. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why police and protesters behave in a certain way at a certain time, but one explanation for the kettle’s failure to form lies with a new communications network, which launched that afternoon: Sukey.
H/T to Craig Zeni for the link.
James Delingpole falls for the latest cry of ecological doom:
The Zoological Society of London has drawn up a hit list of the 10 attractive coral species most likely to die quite soon. Well, of course it has. Nothing suits the ZSL’s spirit of misanthropy and catastrophism better than another mournful litany of all the species loss which is bound to occur as a result of mankind’s ongoing crime of having the temerity to exist.
Look: those of us on the other side of the argument like corals too. The difference is, we see them as something to celebrate and enjoy rather than things to be regarded solely through a prism of guilt, self-hatred and apocalyptic despair. Naturalists never used to talk this way. Until the Nazis — and, before them, the German romantics — started poisoning the wells, nature was something we could all happily appreciate without being made to feel by yet another eco-fascist that we were personally going to be the cause of its imminent demise.
If the ZSL wants to make a list of pretty corals, why can’t it just distribute it with facts about their habitats and their formation, maybe with lots of nice shiny pictures for us all to wonder at? Why must they lace their message with doom and misanthropy?
I suppose their excuse will be that these corals ARE endangered and that something must be done by YESTERDAY at the latest. But is this another of those overblown eco-panics in the manner of the floating island of plastic bags twice the size of Texas which in fact turned out to be 1/100th the size of Texas?
It’s an unfortunate fact that in order to get media attention to their cause du jour, the situation not only has to be defined as simply as possible, it also has to be positioned in such a way that the media want to get the message out. The easiest way to accomplish this is to go apocalyptic: doom, Doom, DOOM!
James Delingpole has a bit of fun at London mayor Boris Johnson’s expense:
. . . what sounds like a fervent declaration of faith in the Warmist creed may on closer examination be a perfectly innocuous statement of the bleeding obvious cunningly calculated to appease all Boris’s rentseeking chums in the City who stand to make a fortune from the Great Carbon Scam and would be most displeased if the Mayor of London were to show signs of wobbling.
Yet wobbling is, of course, exactly what Boris is doing. Or rather — remember, this is the man so ambitious he makes Alexander The Great look like Olive from On The Buses — he is slyly repositioning himself to take advantage of the inevitable collapse of public faith in the Great Anthropogenic Global Warming Ponzi Scheme.
All those thousands of people who’ve had their Christmas ruined as a result of Heathrow airport’s pathetic inability to operate in the snow; all those thousands who have been stranded shivering for eight hours at a stretch on our motorways; all those thousands who can’t use their local municipal sports club because the staff — as is the wont of public sector workers — can’t be bothered to allow themselves to be inconvenienced by the inclement conditions; all those people who are going to look at their electricity and gas bills come the end of next quarter and be appalled beyond measure by how increasingly unaffordable they are; all those businesses big and small whose profits are going to be seriously dented by our political class’s ongoing failure to address our transport infrastructure (and no I don’t mean the irrelevant high-speed rail link to Birmingham; I mean the much bigger problem of our shortage of runways at the airports serving London).
All these thousands of people add up to a lot of disgruntled voters ready to ask hard questions about everything from the size of the state (so patently NOT being shrunk to any significant degree by Cameron’s useless Coalition of the Unwilling) to the three main parties’ position on “Global Warming”.
John Oates has a bit of fun at the expense of the Metropolitan Police:
Police appeal for missing Taser
Shocking loss, but stunning Christmas presentThe Metropolitan Police ia appealing for the return of a Taser and four cartridges that were left on the roof of a police car, which was then driven away…
A Met firearms officer attended an early morning briefing at Norfolk Row, Lambeth. After the briefing, possibly focussed on coffee and a bacon sandwich, the copper put the Taser on the roof of the marked police car and drove off.
An hour and a half later it dawned on the unfortunate officer what had happened, by which time the Taser was no longer on the roof.
If there was one trade show in Britain you’d be certain that The Register would cover, it would have to be Erotica 2010:
Whether it was the cold or the recession, Erotica 2010 – the 15th year of the international sex exposition – appears to have ever so slightly wilted.
It is not exactly shrivelled, but is a little smaller; not the proud, thrusting standard-bearer of the UK’s adult erotic industry it once was.
A quick totting up through the programme suggests around 20 fewer exhibitors than two years ago.
[. . .]
Yet again, a glittering procession of acts — from pole dancers to zentai dolls — took to the stage at the heart of the show, with pride of place for the inimitable Dita von Teese. Sadly, we are unable to bring you any pictures of her act, under pain of a penalty fee of $1m, which all journalists were required to agree to before entering the hall!
Fight! Fight! Trademark case! Trademark case!
The Hells Angels are apparently going to war with British fashion house Alexander McQueen after accusing the couturiers of infringing on their trademarks.
The California-based motorcycle club, whose fearsome reputation includes the sudden and brutal application of trademark lawyers, believes the dressmakers, and its retailers, have overstepped the mark with a series of clothes and accessories featuring a skull and wings death head design.
Alexander McQueen, whose eponymous founder committed suicide earlier this year, allegedly sold items including a $495 Hells Four Finger Ring and a $1595 Hells Angels Jaquard Box Dress, the Hells Angels charge.
September, 1940: the start of the Blitz:
The London Blitz started quietly. Less than 100 incidents reported by the London Fire Brigade up to 5pm on September 7, 1940. Only a few weeks after the British victory in the Battle of Britain, what came then must have been a terrible shock for Londoners. You can read the original Guardian archive report of the night here.
At 5.30pm, some 348 German bombers escorted by 617 fighters pounded London until 6.00pm. Guided by the flames, a second group attacked with more incendiary bombs two hours later, lasting into the next day.
Note, that link to the Guardian archive is a bit badly behaved: it resized my browser window.
Update: Rare colour footage of the Blitz.
The continuing story of police harassment of peaceful photographers has still not come to a middle:
The Metropolitan Police Force cannot be guaranteed to abide by the law when it comes to allowing the public their right to take photographs.
That was the startling admission made last week by Met Police Commissioner John Stephenson under sharp questioning from Liberal Democrat London Assembly Member Dee Doocey during a Police Authority Meeting on 22 July in City Hall. Video footage of the exchange is available on the Metropolitan Police Authority site, with relevant footage from around the 68 minute mark.
[. . .]
He admitted that he was aware of a recent disturbing incident that took place in Romford, which according to Doocey represented “eight minutes of two of your officers intimidating somebody”.
She continued: “At one stage they say that they don’t need a law to stop them photographing, but much more worrying, they don’t need a law to take them away. It’s not a question in my view of . . . It’s so serious that it don’t think it should be somebody giving them words of advice and I don’t also agree with you that it is a question of officers using their discretion.
“This was very black and white: Two of your officers who, despite the fact that I know you have given them guidelines because I have a copy of it, who totally disregarded them and were either so completely ignorant of the law, or decided to ignore the law — they were just going to say they knew the law better than the person they were talking to — they were very seriously intimidating. I find it quite worrying that I don’t think you are taking this quite as seriously as I think you should be.”
In short, the powers-that-be have grudgingly acknowledged that photographers do indeed have the right to take photos unmolested by PC Plod, but admitted that it’s still not actually been properly communicated to Plod and the other coppers on the beat.
We asked the Met for official comment as to why, despite the numerous efforts made by Assistant Commissioner John Yates and other serving officers to get the message about photography across, such incidents kept occurring. They suggested that these incidents were a very small part of the whole story of London policing, that to expect zero incidents was unrealistic, and that when such incidents occurred, they tended to be blown up out of all proportion by the press.
An alternative explanation, suggested to us by current and recently serving police officers with whom we have spoken, is that such incidents represent a far more disturbing aspect of police culture. They suggest that a small minority of officers see the law as being “what they say it is”, and these officers are quite prepared to take their chances, on the basis that the number of times they will be caught out by being recorded is likely to be few and far between.
It’s almost as if the police are sublimating their frustrations with the out-of-control but politically favoured members of certain religious groups and instead victimizing members of the public who don’t have political favour.
The most recent recipients of a royal charter are the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists:
The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists received its Royal Charter yesterday — its mark of approval from the Queen.
The Livery Companies were originally proto-trade unions or professional standards bodies, depending which you look at it, based in the City of London. The first, the Worshipful Company of Mercers, got its Royal Charter in 1394 but was in existence for an unknown time before that. Although some retain a regulatory role — assay marks to show the purity of gold and silver are still overseen by the Company of Goldsmiths — most are now social and charitable bodies.
Yesterday’s ceremony was part of Evensong at London’s most beautiful building, St Paul’s Cathedral. The actual Royal Charter — a large vellum certificate — was blessed before freemen and livery men walked to Mansion House escorted by a ceremonial guard of Pikemen and Musketeers for a banquet with the Lord Mayor.
I was hoping that the recipients were the chaps with the morion helmets and the back-and-breastplates:
I’m not from London, but the England I grew up in looked very similar to the typical street scenes here (except I grew up in Middlesbrough, so imagine looking at these scenes through a dark gray filter): Wasleso’s London 1960s slideshow.
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